Does Saying “Link in Bio” Affect Your Instagram Post Performance? (Experiment)

Rumors have been circulating lately about the internet water cooler: Are there any posts with the words “link in bio” in the title? less preferred With the Instagram algorithm?

As much as we love some juicy gossip at Moyens I/O HQ, we love the cold, harsh, social media facts even more.

So we decided to do a little experiment, put this theory to the test, and find the truth once and for all.

Read on (or watch our video below) to open our experiment and find out if the “link in bio” is an acceleration killer.

Hypothesis: Adding “link” to your caption will reduce Instagram post performance

The fact that Instagram doesn’t allow clickable links directly in headers is a huge marketing hurdle.

Despite the mind-blowing monthly user count (a billion!), Instagram actually only sends a fraction of the traffic to other websites. With only one-third of Instagram’s active users, Twitter generates five times more web traffic by comparison.

Of course, for the old butcher Jura Park quote, “Links find a way.” Users have found a workaround to direct traffic to their website using the URL in the bio section of their Instagram profile.

That’s why you often see the phrase “link in bio” at the end of a thread that takes followers to a clickable link.

In fact, an entire cottage industry of Link-in-Bio products has sprung up around this practice. These are Moyens I/O’s products such as oneclick.bio, Linktree or Campsite that create a landing page that aggregates multiple links in one place. (Learn how to create your own custom page to embed in your Instagram bio in this guide.)

A Parse.ly study actually found that Link-in-Bio tools increase Instagram referral traffic by 10% to 15%.

But despite the effectiveness of this hack, there are still many people who believe that Instagram is actively trying to crush this creative problem-solving.

Other tests

Between anecdotal reports and gut feeling, social media experts are brimming with suspicion. A member of the Facebook group Social Media Geekout went so far as to conduct an experiment last September and compared the interaction on two posts: one with the “link” in the text and the other without.

Is it the result? The post with “link in bio” got much lower engagement.

These were some pretty juicy results that sparked a ton of conversation. Was Instagram deliberately penalizing posters who tried to remove users from the platform? Did the “link in bio” call-to-action just distract your followers from engaging their attention in other ways?

Ultimately, however, this study was inconclusive, as several commentators have suggested. There were too many variables in the game: The poster was comparing two very different images with very different content, broadcast on different days and times.

How could he have known that it was the “link in the biography” factor alone that was hurting his engagement?

To really find out, we need to compare posts that are identical except for adding a “link in bio” to a title. So we did exactly that.

methodology

For this experiment, I decided to use an Instagram Business account for a wedding magazine I helped organize to make sure we have a large pool of followers to experiment with: over 10,000.

The plan: to compare the interaction of the same image and the same title posted on the same day of the week, at the same time, I would add “link bio” at the end, with the only difference being a week. title.

In case Pic #1 is a completely unrelated dud, I repeated the same format with two other images on different days of the week to see if we could observe any patterns.

I sent six messages in total. Three of these posts had “link bio” in the title.

All my followers probably thought there was something really weird going on, but if that got them talking about the brand, that’s positive, right? Hot social media tip: Always keep your audience guessing to develop an air of mystery.

Results

TL; DR: All my Instagram posts with “link in bio” in the caption performed slightly better than those who are not.

I used the Instagram Report in Moyens I/O Analytics to compare the performance of Instagram posts with and without “link in bio”. It is possible to sort the posts according to the likes and comments from the Instagram table.

Our recurring post on Wednesday featured a happy, good-looking couple holding an impressive bouquet.

I submitted this on February 10th and a week later on February 17th, both at 6:02pm (why not!). The subtitle was exactly the same… except February 17th I added the “link in the bio”.

Link in bio post: 117 likes and 2 comments.

No link in bio post: 86 likes and 1 comment.

Winning? Link is in bio. That’s more than a 30% increase in likes. (The comment sample size is probably too small to count. Bummer.)

Let’s take a look at our recurring posts on Thursday. There were no people in this photo, just a long beautifully set table, ready for a wedding in the mountains. I posted this on February 11 (no “link in bio”) and February 18 (with “link in bio”) both days at 20:01.

Link in bio post: 60 likes and 1 comment.

No link in bio post: 60 likes and 2 comments.

Winning? We’ll have to call it a Draw.

On Saturday, February 13 and Saturday, February 20, I posted duplicate photos, this time a trendy wedding dress.

Link in bio post: 45 likes and 0 comments.

No link in bio post: 40 likes and 2 comments.

Winning? Link is in bio. That’s about a 15% increase in likes. It’s not that shabby!

A little wise to the lack of comments, I dug into Instagram’s in-app analytics (aka Instagram Insights) to see if I could gather anything else. And when I sort To reachI learned something very interesting…

Posts containing “link in bio”, all seen by more people.

Here is a comparison chart:

What do the results mean?

When I started this experiment, I expected that at some point, I would get caught up in an exciting discussion and analysis with Moyens I/O’s expert social media strategists and study the meaning of the results until the wee hours of the morning. “Damn Brayden, people need answers!” I was ready to shout.

But to be honest… I don’t think I should waste my brain power on this. Seems pretty choppy to me.

If there’s some kind of major Instagram collusion to bury “link in bio” comments, that hasn’t happened in the last two weeks of experimentation.

In fact, for whatever reason, all my posts with “link in bio” actually happened. better. Not necessarily by a huge margin, but they all got more eyeballs and more likes.

Why were the comments so few? This is probably a personal problem that needs to be resolved. I think I’ll be up all night instead.

This was clearly a quick and dirty experiment with a small sample size, but my conclusion is that you can link to your heart’s content in the bio without fear of getting revenge on Instagram.

However, if you try your own scientific research and discover something different, we’d love to hear about it! tweet us @hoosuite and let us know how your own social media lab was impacted.

In this ever-changing world, we try to beat the algorithm at every opportunity. The more data the better.

Manage your Instagram presence along with your other social channels and save time using Moyens I/O. You can link to bio pages, schedule and publish posts, engage the audience, and measure performance from a single dashboard. Try it for free today.